HYDERABAD: A recent public interest litigation (PIL) filed in the Telangana High Court (HC) sought a stay on the process of a gazette notification issued by the Union Ministry of Home Affairs on July 31, 2019, in pursuance of the Citizenship (Registration of citizens and issue of National identity cards) Rules, 2003.
The PIL sought to declare the Citizenship Rules, 2003, under which the National Population Register (NPR) exercise is going to be carried out, as unconstitutional. It also seeks to declare Section 14A of the Citizenship Act, 1955, as violative of fundamentals rights in the Constitution.
Petitioners SQ Masood, social activist; and Namrata Jaiswal, advocate, stated that the State’s process to update the NPR is seemingly being done simultaneously with the exercise of house listing and housing census of India, 2021. NPR is a process that collects personal information of usual residents and is fundamentally a process of ‘identification’.
There is no provision of law either under the Census Act, 1948 or in the Citizenship Rules, 2003 that permits the clubbing of the two processes, which are arbitrary and will cause agony and hardship to common public, besides loss of public money. In fact, the Rules on the NPR process enact a nationwide presumption of criminality by compelling every citizen to affirmatively come forth to prove their citizenship in the verification and scrutiny of their particulars in the population register, they stated.
The Ministry had issued a notification on Jan 7, 2020, that the house listing operations of the Census of India, 2021, shall take place between April 1 and September 30, 2020. The Citizenship Rules, 2003, are silent on what information will be required of residents to build the NPR, and likewise, what information will be required from citizens to build the NCR. Secretary to Ministry of Home Affairs, Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India and the State Chief Secretary are named as the respondents.